Wilhelm Schmidt, (born Feb. 16, 1868, Hörde, Ger.—died Feb. 10, 1954, Fribourg, Switz.) German anthropologist and Roman Catholic priest who led the influential cultural-historical European school of ethnology. He was a member of the Society of the Divine Word missionary order.

Schmidt was early influenced by such anthropologists as Franz Boas and Edward Westermarck, but he was most profoundly impressed by the ideas of Fritz Graebner on cultural diffusion formulated in the theory of Kulturkreise. In 1906 he founded the journal Anthropos, which reported ethnographic field research by missionaries of his order stationed in all parts of the world, most notably in New Guinea and Togo, and became one of the leading journals in ethnology.

Schmidt studied the evolution of the family and correlated different family types with subsistence patterns. He also suggested that even in small-scale societies the individual exerts an influence on community institutions. After World War I he attempted to apply Graebner’s cultural-diffusion principle on a worldwide basis. He published extensively, addressing many of his writings on the family and social ethics to general readers. His major work is Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, 12 vol. (1912–55; “The Origin of the Idea of God”). In this and in his Ursprung und Werden der Religion (1930; The Origin and Growth of Religion), Schmidt maintained that most people around the world believe in a supreme being and that many religions outside well-known faiths such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam might correctly be regarded as monotheistic.

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The German Roman Catholic priest and ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954), however, brought anthropological expertise to bear in a series of investigations of such primitive societies as those of the Tierra del Fuegians (South America), the Negrillos of Rwanda (Africa), and the Andaman Islanders (Indian Ocean). The results were assembled in his Der Ursprung der Gottesidee...

in Austronesian languages

...the Austroasiatic languages (the Munda languages of eastern India and the Mon-Khmer languages of mainland Southeast Asia) with Austronesian. The original hypothesis, first proposed in 1906 by Wilhelm Schmidt and long neglected by most linguists, has been greatly strengthened by more recent research.

...on the grounds that it excludes the darker-skinned peoples of Melanesia. He referred instead to the “Ocean” family of languages. In 1906 the Austrian anthropologist and linguist Wilhelm Schmidt proposed that the Munda languages of eastern India and the Mon-Khmer languages of mainland Southeast Asia form a language family, which he christened Austroasiatic (meaning...